Star Wars Roleplay: Chaos

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A Pass In the Halls

The Handmaiden

Guest
T
[member="Hal Terrano"]

"Pathetic." Her voice rolled over him, strong, stark, a rasp that called out to him.

Avalore stood over Hal, watching him, sneering at him, the expression somehow foreign to her face. She looked down at Hal, just...staring. Her eyes were set hard, and as she took a step forward the visage around her seemed to fade for half a second. Beneath a cloak of flesh her true form was revealed, black skin and deep yellow eyes flaring but half a second as she stared at him, The Handmaiden showing herself as Hal looked away and at the ground.

"But you don't have to be." Her voice was a gnash of teeth. "You can stop. You can be better."

There was a sudden clatter of metal.

It would ring out directly in front of him clanging against the marble floor and rolling towards his feet.

A dagger.

"You can stop." The blade, of course, was not for him to harm himself, was not meant for him to end himself with, but to end her. It was black, from handle to blade a stark abyss, slightly curved and half dotted with red gems that seemed to interlace throughout it. A stark red ruby sat at the very end of it, a slight sheen carrying from it up into Hal's eyes. He would feel it's allure, it's calling, as though it was aching to be picked up, demanding to be used.

"You can end me." She said. "You can become strong again."
 
"Pathetic."

I know.

It was too much to bear, hearing all of his own thoughts projected by her voice, especially when he had only been accustomed to her kindness. This, alongside the very thought that she had abandoned him, that she didn't care and that she had so-easily moved along with her life was too much.

Every time that Hal Terrano thought he was truly broken he was proven wrong, and then shattered further.

The clatter roused his head from his hands, revealing grim eyes cast in despair and devoid of colour. Irises sat in inky pools of black, much like the void around them, much like the dagger that sat before him. Despair, in its purest form. The abyss.

Avalore's form spoke grave words, again pushing for something nigh impossible for his imagination. He was not a killer. No matter if she had abandoned him, no matter if she really despised him, no matter if she had moved along in life and had found love with another. He wasn't sure if it was tattered remnants of the Code, or if it was just further cowardice.

Still, the blade called for his hand, digits trembling as they reached forth, his right hand wrapping around the midnight hilt. The hunger struck him, almost begging to be used, begging to be plunged into a still-beating heart.

He'd thought about it before.

The end.

Even is own limited imagination tried to play through the finale. Where he would do it. When he would do it. The why was not a question that needed to be asked. Every second was torment, it was guilt, it was shame, it was a thousand screaming voices within his own mind that judged him, that reminded him. It was the screams of that jester within the cell. It was the snap of Lira Dajenn's neck.

Ultimately he could never bring himself to do it.

Again, was it cowardice? Or was it hope? A small subdued part of his mind believed that she was coming, and for that he could not do it, not to her.

But she wasn't. She wasn't coming. She had never been.

“I won't...not ever,” he finally replied quietly, head tilted upwards and his left hand also moving to the hilt of the dagger. Slowly, the weapon was raised blade downwards by hands that seemed to be steadying, almost as if he felt conviction for the first time in what was years. The void in his eyes stared upwards at her form and there was a moment of stillness.

“I'm sorry, Avalore. For everything.

Suddenly, violently, Hal Terrano plunged the dagger into his own heart.

---

[member="The Handmaiden"]
 

The Handmaiden

Guest
T
[member="Hal Terrano"]

Oh there was a beauty in this. A beauty that even the Handmaiden had not expected. In their brief time together Hal had not struck her as a Sith, at least not in any traditional sense of the word. Perhaps in some ancient Orders, in some world where the scholar was respected more than the warrior he would have been loved. In ages past and in centuries where the Sith had reigned over entire empires he would have been loved. Yet here, now, where war was the way of the galaxy and battle was what made one great Hal was naught but what he saw himself as.

A failure.

Yet here was an act.

An act of redemption, of peace, of trying to save the woman that he loved.

Perhaps that was admirable, noble even, but it would have been a lie to say that The Handmaiden had not seen it coming, that she had not foreseen this. It was not due to her gift that she had known, not even because she had dug so deep within his mind, but simply because she knew him. There was a plain sense to him, a nobility that was not common within this galaxy, a righteous sense of duty and honor that some might have found endearing.

Handmaiden only found it exploitable.

The dagger went plunging into soft flesh, carving into soft skin and stabbing through muscle and bone almost instantly, but it was not Hal's flesh, it was not Hal's muscles and it was not Hal's heart. The world seemed to shift, the very edge of reality shifting as suddenly the two of them traded places. The Handmaiden, no, Avalore found herself upon her knees, Hal standing above her. The blade was plunged into her chest, her own fingers laced around the hilt of the dagger.

Her eyes were wide open, blood spilled from her lips, her gaze falling directly at Hal's. Her fingers loosened around the blade, her eyes wandering up and over Hal. A single word passed from her lips, mixed with a spew of blood and a choke of maroon. "Why?"

Avalore collapsed onto the floor.
 
There was no pain.

There was no pain because the blade had not pierced his flesh.

For a moment he was disorientated, confused even. His vantage point from upon the floor having shifted in nothing more than a blink. He was standing where she had stood, looking down as she had been and there she was, Avalore Eden upon her knees, dagger embedded in her chest, her own hands wrapped around the hilt.

“NO!”

His voice was a roar, it boomed throughout the abyss as Hal dropped to his knees so hard that it could have only reverberated through his bones.

“No! No! No! No! NO! NO!”

Terrano rushed to try and help, moving to carefully cradle the healer's form, his eyes wide in panic his heart thumping so hard against his chest it almost hurt. One arm scooped her up, pulling her onto his lap, the other twitched uselessly hovering about the dagger embedded in her breast.

“I DON'T UNDERSTAND!”

Tears began to well, settling blackened eyes beneath a glazed sheen as his free hand could only move to clutch onto her as Hal began to rock back and forth upon his knees, holding onto the healer's form like her life was worth more than her own.

“...Avalore…?” Terrano whimpered, his voice cracking as he looked down upon her face, upon that trickle of blood that sat so cruelly upon her soft lips. “...please...Avalore...please….I don't know….I don't know!”

---

[member="The Handmaiden"]
 

The Handmaiden

Guest
T
[member="Hal Terrano"]

Above them, The Handmaiden loomed.

She stood tall, her faded yellow eyes burning onto Hal.

She watched.

She listened.

There was a joy that played across her face, a cruel jest of a smile that made her appear all the more monstrous. Her hood was entirely pulled back, her stark red hair revealed and playing over the horns on her head, Tattoos played all over her face, stabbed into her lips and drawing out from them as though they were a natural growth of the skin. She appeared a demon, her eyes wandering over Hal as she looked down at him cradling Avalore's now dead body. The air around them seemed to thicken, breathing becoming harder, and the world seeming to twist in upon itself as the blackness returned to settle all around them.

"You did it, Hal." Her voice echoed, hissing like a snake. Her fingers reaching out to gently touch his shoulder. "You ended her."

There would be a slight burn to her touch, a branding as her finger tips sailed against his skin. Her eyes floated from him to her, Avalore's body rapidly beginning to decay, her flesh becoming pale, her eyes losing color, her lips becoming blue. She began to waste away in front of his eyes, slowly turning into nothing but a rotted corpse. "Feel that pain. That anger."

She drew him in further.

"Embrace it." The Handmaiden told him. "Seize it."
 
She was dead.

Avalore Eden was dead in his arms.

Shades of what he had felt when Lira had been murdered returned to settle in his stomach, forming as hot bile in the back of his throat only now it felt as though it had been magnified. Still he cradled her, muttering and whimpering indecipherable noises as if he was nothing more than a wounded animal.

The voice of a serpent barely roused him, his focus set upon the body of the woman that he loved. Terrano didn't even flinch as her malicious touched grazed his shoulder, too absorbed in his horror and his pain to be afflicted by his fear of a woman's touch.

You ended her.

“...I didn't...I didn't….”

Deepest nightmare became truth as the healer began to decay within his very arms, the warmth of her body become cold and lifeless. Flesh becoming taut across bone, the life leaving her eyes, the colour leaving her flesh. It was too much. Mind raced faster than his heart. His wall of logic crumbling before that wildly swinging wrecking ball of emotion.

His head snapped upwards at the horned demon that still spoke to him, a sly smirk slapped onto her ghastly features. The prior blackness that had adorned his irises snapped to crimson, to a red that spoke of blood and of hatred and rage.

“YOU!”

Hal sprang upwards and towards the woman, his body and mind working upon instinct and emotion and his hands went immediately for her throat.

“IT WAS YOU!”

---

[member="The Handmaiden"]
 

The Handmaiden

Guest
T
[member="Hal Terrano"]

The Handmaiden didn't resist, didn't even flinch as his grasp tightened around her throat and began to constrict her airways. There was no sign of pain, of hurt, of ear, no sign of anything resembling what she should have been feeling. Instead she offered him a flat stare, a simple gaze, something that hinted at smugness, something that hinted that perhaps this was what she had wanted all along. She looked at Hal, her eyes slowly finding his before she once again spoke.

"No." The Handmaiden said simply, her voice a gasping rasp. "It was you."

She blinked.

"You plunged the knife, Hal. You stabbed the blade. Not I." Her eyes flickered behind Hal.

Avalore was now decomposing even more rapidly, her body wasting away with every breath, ever wisp of air, every little thing. Her flesh melted away, her eyes disappeared, her face contorted into a visage of absolute horror and terror. Eventually she turned to naught but bone, her form wasting away completely as her sprawled corpse turned into a skeleton. The Handmaiden watched the decomposing corpse for a time, her attention caught by the spectacle.

Then she regarded Hal. "It was you."

She sounded as though she were barely breathing now.
 
“I KNOW WHAT I DID!” Hal screamed in response, knowing full well that he had chosen his own life to end. He was seemingly a man in confusion about almost everything else, but not that, never that.

“It was MY chest! It was MY heart!”
Wrath was poured forth into his hands, his grip growing almost impossibly tight as he did so. Again, it was similar to his reaction to Lira's death, when his senses left him in that moment and he had tried to crack through Vrag's Yuuzhan Vong armour with naught but his fists.

Swept away by the torrent of rage that flowed through his blood Hal's attentions remained solely focused upon the infernal woman and squeezing the life from her throat. He couldn't look back, as if he was too consumed by his anger to be capable of such.

“IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ME!”

His left hand remained wrapped around her throat like unmoving stone while his right came away, hand clenching into a vicious fist that came shooting at the centre of the woman's smug face.

---

[member="The Handmaiden"]
 

The Handmaiden

Guest
T
[member="Hal Terrano"]

The pressure at her throat tightened, the pinpricks of his fingers digging into her neck, yet her face never changed. She remained impassive, her gaze flickering towards Hal and lingering on him for only a moment more before moving slowly towards the corpse upon the floor. Her flat stare returned to him, uninterested, unaware of the encroaching death that lay upon her. Her head twisted just slight, her movements unrestricted, red hair flourished, her horns pointed down.

Yellow eyes flickered towards the skeleton on the floor, and slowly, slowly she watched it begin to wilt away. The bone turned gray, then to black, then to a dull shade of its former self. At a crawl the skeletal form began to turn to dust, first the tips of the bone then slowly more and more. Piece by piece it all fell apart, piece by piece it all slowly began to wilt and disappear. The Handmaiden watched it, then finally turned her attention back to Hal.

"No." She said simply.

"No it wasn't." There was barely a breath to her voice. "It was never supposed to be you...never...."

The oxygen ran out, and so her thoughts reached towards his own. Never you. Always her. Know this. Accept it. Embrace it.

Suddenly the world came crashing in upon itself. The abyss swallowed them whole, the blackness around them reaching and spreading, everything turn into absolute nothing. A heartbeat passed, the entirety of reality seemed to shift, shatter, and break. There was a scream, though whether it came form Hal or The Handmaiden was impossible to tell. Suddenly they were no longer located within the ethos of space, no longer within The Handmaidens reality, but instead back in that hall. They stood where they had begun, passing one another, their steps almost in sync as they moved passed one another.

The Handmaiden stepped beside Hal, a flick of her wrist moving up as a blade sliced the top of his hand.
 
Never you. Always her. Know this. Accept it. Embrace it.

Just as his savage punch was about to land the world became no more, as if they were two figments written upon parchment that had suddenly been torn and thrown into the bin.

Suddenly he was back in the Sith Hall, and it felt as if he hadn't been here in years. Disoriented, Hal found himself walking forwards, as he had been prior to such a nightmare. It was like walking up stairs and taking an extra step where there was none, it was jarring. The emotions that had been screaming from his pores were still there, his crimson eyes were still wide and wild, lips curled into a snarl.

Before he even had time to find his bearings, something sliced his hand.

Immediately there was pain. Usually Hal Terrano was steadfast in the face of physical pain, after all it was nothing more than nerves signalling to the brain that there is unpleasant stimuli. He had once tried to carve the Dark Mark out of his own flesh with a blade. Vrag had removed his fingernails one-by-one when he was on her slab.. The Yuuzahn Vong biots in the place of his eyes were given to him in a very ritual of pain.

Usually pain was something he vanquished with cold emotionless logic.

This was not the same.

The moment of the cut, a scream of absolute agony erupted from the man. His hand felt as if it had been dipped in molten lava, the pain was so bad that instinct almost called for him to cut off the limb.

Instead, however, Hal collapsed to the ground, clutching his own hand with such an intensity it was likely that the man broke the bones within. Not that he would notice. He couldn't think. His head was still full of the wrath from only moments prior. Every nearby Sith's attention was drawn towards him, but the Temple was not a house of sympathy.

Not that he noticed them.

---

[member="The Handmaiden"]
 

The Handmaiden

Guest
T
[member="Hal Terrano"]

There was no taunt.

No words. Nothing.

The Handmaiden did not gloat, she did not ridicule, and she certainly did not try to kill him. That wasn't what this was about, it wasn't what she was here to do, it wasn't what she was meant to do. Instead she shifted slightly, regarding those around them as though she were silencing them with only a gaze. Even the Lords of the hall seemed to steer clear, knowing full well what she was, or rather, what she represented. They quickly moved away, each of them stalking towards their destination as they ignored the screaming Archivist upon the floor.

For a moment the Iktochi lingered, standing above him and simply enjoying the symphony of his screams. There was a joy to those sounds, a beautiful orchestra that she herself could not have directed. Her eyes closed for a moment, and then slowly she crouched down beside him. Her hood was once again drawn over her face, her eyes settling on the cut upon Ha's hand. He would feel the sting of that for days to come, the agony, the hurt.

It would be with him and slowly spread through him.

"Survive this." She whispered above his screams, speaking directly into his ear. "Remember this. Then Kill them. Use your anger, your rage. Slaughter them for what they did."

Standing above him as his screams turned to whimpers The Handmaiden said one final thing. "You know you're capable now."

With that she began to depart.
 
Despite no longer existing within her nightmare realm Terrano's emotions had not yet subsided and he was very much still full to the brim with wrath and despair. It may have been naught but illusion but the grief inflicted was nothing but real. He still desired nothing more than to wrap his hands back around her throat and crush the life from her, however at that moment it was practically impossible.

The crippling pain that emanated from his hand took priority over all thoughts, over any action that he could have taken. The sole focus of his attentions could not escape that realm of agony, which left him vulnerable, essentially paralysed upon the floor of the hall.

Survive this.

Ears that could do naught but hear, the creature did not taunt or mock him but instead left notions, imprints upon his mind to coincide with this exact moment in time. It hearkened back to suggestions made in the abyss, to revenge and to rage. Slaughter was never an intention of Hal Terranno but in a mind muddied with pain it was hard to deny.

The hooded woman began to depart, leaving him a sprawling bleating mess upon the floor. Face reddened by strain and by screams, Hal attempted to crawl after her but was simply unable, his burning hand taking priority above movement.

All that the man could do was look up and watch her go, eyes still burning molten red. He opened his mouth to shout after her, but there was nothing more than animalistic gurgles.

You know you're capable now.

---

[member="The Handmaiden"]
 

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